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Drug Development Portfolio Reporting

The pharmaceutical industry makes up the one of the largest segments of our OnePager users, and by no coincidence. The visuals that OnePager can create are absolutely ideal for communicating an initiative that has a sequential flow and at any level, however, it is the program and portfolio-level visuals that appear to provide the most obvious value in pharma initially, leading to an eventual and organic shift to a more broad utilization for all plan-related communications.

Additionally, a significant portion of our users in this industry are not career project managers or schedulers, but scientists! We believe this is a testament to the ease of use of OnePager and that it is for “people who plan things,” not just resources who by their very nature have their heads buried in the scheduling details of a particular project.

Most of our medium to large sized pharmaceutical customers have evolved to the point where, as a company, they are utilizing a centralized portfolio management system, which allows broad, standardized, and controlled management and tracking of every initiative the company is undertaking. These tools, such as Microsoft Project Professional in combination with Project Server, or Primavera, Clarity, Planisware, to name a few, are good at performing the functions necessary within project, program and company portfolio management (build a plan, create/assign resources, track/manage budget), however, most of our clients have selected OnePager to supplement these applications to more easily create and manage data-driven high-quality program and portfolio-level visuals.

While the portfolio management tools available have a cornucopia of reports and modules that are typically provided with them (or can be added for a cost), none have the ability to generate a real-time user-defined condensed version of the task/milestone/schedule/project/program/portfolio level data within their databases in a presentation-quality visual from a planning-standpoint (think timeline, milestone view, or Gantt chart). The broad and trending term for this is data visualization, however, we like to refer to our corner of the world as “Gantt Art,” which is becoming more and more important given the emphasis on clear and concise communications.

Without OnePager, managers will go to great lengths to manually produce and present a visual representation of their consolidated initiatives or select data in Excel, Visio, PowerPoint, etc., which will often take several resources many hours to complete and update periodically, with the understanding that the report information will be out of date the minute someone updates something in the actual system…not ideal. With OnePager a Pharmaceutical firm can have clarity around their initiatives at any level as they move through the development process.

Most of the early and immediate value for our newer pharma customers is focused in drug development. Here is a typical high-level example view of the process, which is regulated by the FDA:

In the discovery and pre-clinical phases a report for the library of products currently in those phases may look like the below Discovery Portfolio example. Each row may actually represent a separate file within the portfolio management system and might be managed by a different scientist, however, using OnePager the data is very easily combined, visualized, and updated as necessary in a fraction of the amount of time it would take to complete manually.

Once an organization has moved passed the discovery and pre-clinical phases and enter clinical trials the level of project management rigor tends to pick up steam as their tends to be more regulatory scrutiny here, given the involvement of humans and an interest in bringing the new product to market as quickly and safely as possible. Management and review boards want to see progression toward top line data as the new product is refined through each phase of trials driving the need for a team to provide a visual of all the products currently in the clinical trial funnel. Again, using the data in the portfolio management application, a visual like the below could be created and maintained much more easily, and in a data-driven fashion, rather than having to be created manually.

If the multi-year view simply becomes too busy to manage, the visual can be condensed to cover only a specific period of time or it can be split into multiple pages using from within OnePager itself.

If you would like to find out how to specifically use your project or portfolio management application to reproduce any of the visuals you see in this article, please contact us or browse our website and blog.

About Jay

Devoted father of two, lover of mountains, entrepreneurism, and beer. Jay carries with him fourteen years of project management experience within the cable, telecom, construction, software development, and energy industries. The spectrum of projects and programs that Jay has managed throughout his career is broad and deep, enabling him to help clients implement Chronicle Graphics software in a multitude of applications. His employment history includes positions at Narvaes Construction, Leslie Brothers Construction, CSG Systems, Echostar Satellite Services, Comcast, and Level 3 Communications.